Monster Loyalty, ala Lady Gaga

by Matthew E May

Lady Gaga is one of the most well-known pop artists in the world, which is no surprise given her vocal talents and often bizarre wardrobe. She’s sold 23 million albums, won five Grammy awards, and been named by Forbes as one of the world’s most powerful celebrities.

But behind the public persona lies a shrewd and calculating business professional, a marketing machine which has turned music lovers into a worldwide legion of diehard fans eager to buy her music, her concert tickets, and any and all products related to her. Is this simply a classic case of loyalty marketing and customer cultivation? Perhaps. Apple aside, few businesses can claim a base of zealots anywhere near the same scope and scale.

In four short years, Lady Gaga has built an army of passionate fans that numbers in the tens of millions around the globe. According to Huba, Lady Gaga didn’t become the success she is today based solely on her talent. She did so through the message she inspires and the community she has built around that message.

The Loyalty Playbook

Huba distills seven key strategies from the Gaga approach, which, while individually effective, become a solid business blueprint when taken together:

Focus on Your “One Percenters”: Gaga spends most of her effort on just one percent of her audience, the highly engaged super-fans who drive word of mouth.

Lead with Values: Create an emotional connection with customers by showcasing what you believe in.

Build Community: Connect your most loyal customers with each other to strengthen their bond with you.

Give Fans a Name: Gaga calls her fans her “Little Monsters.” A name gives customers a way to self-identify as part of the group. In fact, Gaga now has her own social network, little monsters.com.

Make Them Feel Like Rock Stars: Become a fan of your fans and find ways to make them feel special.

Generate Something to Talk About: Make your business “word-of-mouth-worthy” by continually giving your fans reasons to talk about you.

5 Insights to Gaga

While these seven lessons seem sensible enough for a pop star, they beg a bit of insight and explanation in order for businesses to learn from them. Here, Huba answers a few questions:

Lady Gaga has such a specific brand and audience. What can the average businessperson really learn from her?

Gaga’s business of show business may be very different from the “average” business, but her focus on growing through devoted customer loyalty is a universal business objective. Most business people know that it’s far cheaper to keep a customer than to get new one. Gaga gets the math. It’s her overarching philosophy to focus on her core advocates, the super-fans, the “Little Monsters.” These advocates will ultimately be evangelists who bring in new customers on their own. This customer philosophy is one that businesses would do well to learn from Gaga.

How do more practical companies partake in her business philosophies without going over the top?

The best ideas sometimes come from the unlikeliest sources, and whether you love her or hate her, you can’t ignore what she has accomplished. I think it’s important to study what she does, how she does it and why, because there are ways to replicate her success in more traditional business settings. In every lesson from Gaga in the book, I highlight how traditional companies—from Whole Foods to MINI—are applying her methods to their customer bases, without having to wear any dresses made from meat.

You call her Little Monsters “One Percenters.” Can you explain this concept a bit more?

The idea of the One Percenters comes from our research during the early days of online community and social media. I looked at online communities and tracked what percentage of members in those communities created content—in other words, who was most engaged.

I found it amounted to just 1 percent of the total community members. This was surprising. The amount of super-engaged community members did not follow the usual 80/20 rule. We discovered that the volume of content creators was much smaller, at just 1 percent. That’s a very small part of the community, and yet it was creating most of the value for the entire community. Our thesis is that these One Percenters are a business’s most diehard customers—the ones who really love the company, buy new products as soon as they are released, give them as gifts and evangelize the company to everyone they know.

“Little Monsters” is a great fit for Lady Gaga, but can you give an example of how a business might “give fans a name”?

One of the best examples of a brand naming its fans is Maker’s Mark, the premium bourbon company out of Loretto, Kentucky. Bill Samuels, Jr., son of the founder, was looking for a way to better connect with the brand’s fanatical customers and created the Maker’s Mark Ambassador program.

Ambassadors are brand evangelists who volunteer to tell others about the product, and encourage bars that didn’t carry the brand at the time to do so. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of Makers Mark Ambassadors who receive custom business cards and fun holiday gifts from the brand, and gather for events at the distillery in Loretto each year.

What’s the most surprising thing you learned while studying Lady Gaga?

Lady Gaga’s business sense impresses me, but her passion for changing the world for the better through any means possible is what truly inspired me to study her. She is influencing an entire generation of young people to stand up for each other, to be more tolerant of differences and to be brave in the face of difficulty.

I have spent hours and hours reading fan comments about how she has changed lives for the better. I have cried watching YouTube videos of kids saying they thought about hurting themselves or ending their lives, but that her belief in them, a woman they don’t even know, kept them from doing it. They listen to her music, especially “Born This Way,” and they feel better about themselves. I believe that if there was ever a candidate to continue Oprah Winfrey’s legacy of inspiring people to live their best lives, it’s this five-foot-one, 26-year-old in a studded bikini.

Give Monster Loyalty a read, because there’s a lot to learn from Lady Gaga. It is trust that engenders loyalty, and there isn’t a business or individual on the planet that couldn’t improve their trust quotient.

Wait! Before you go…

Matthew E. May is the author of “IN PURSUIT OF ELEGANCE: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing.” He is constantly searching for creative ideas and innovative solutions that are ‘elegant’ – a unique and elusive combination of unusual simplicity and surprising power.

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Interesting but there are a few points that are being missed. The first of which, is that Lady gaga is all hype. Here are a few great examples to counter the comments made.

“her vocal talents and often bizarre wardrobe. She’s sold 23 million albums, won five Grammy awards, and been named by Forbes as one of the world’s most powerful celebrities.”

Her vocal ability is of average range. Gaga, besides using layers of pre-recorded vocals under (and sometimes over) her “live” vocals, she sounds awful when she moves, has anyone ever paid attention to the live vocals of “Judas”, “Bad Romance”, Poker face”? She sounds like a dog in pain when she sings live – those layers of pre-recorded studio vocals backing them up are there for a reason.

Gaga has her good moments: when she is sitting still and only moving her hands to play the piano. Those are the only moments she sounds good and doesn’t rely on pre-recorded vocals to cover up her bad vocals.

Of those 23 million albums she has sold, those numbers are on a steady decline. The fame monster did not sell more than the fame and born this way did not sell more than the the fame monster.

Forbes also contributes to the Hype, the same magazine that hired roger friedman, the person that was fired from fox news for making things up? Forbes lost it’s credibility a long time ago when they stopped being journalists and bowed to what the public wanted.

“But behind the public persona lies a shrewd and calculating business professional”

Behind the person there is actually drug addict who is currently in rehab, someone that has suffered from multiple eating disorders and mental health issues all through out her life and someone that cries at the drop of a hat. Why do you think lady gaga claims to be so in tune with “art”? No one on the face of the planet is that in tune with art. It’s a severe problem with her emotion state that leads her to believe that. How many successful business women do you know, that have these problems? her team, are experts. Not in business. In creating false Hype.

“a marketing machine which has turned music lovers into a worldwide legion of diehard fans eager to buy her music, her concert tickets, and any and all products related to her”

But this is simply not true. Simple maths shows that her product and ticket sales are on a decline. Remember that just because gaga tweets to her twitter followers that she’s doing well doesn’t make it so.

Examine the numbers. Billboard report (as reported to them by her own team) that 200,000 refunds were given for the 22 cancelled shows. 200,000/22 is 9090 tickets per show. Now look up the venue capacity for all of those shows remanning, the average is 19,000 capacity. 17,000 including stage room. At the time the show in North America was cancelled gaga had sold less than 50 percent of her shows. – Does that honestly sound like a die hard fan base to you?

In terms of business sense, lady gaga adopts the old saying “fake it till you make it” the only problem is that she;s not going to make it. You can’t argue with the official numbers. She’s on a steady decline and she won’t be around in the next 5 years in this same capacity. It’s likely she’ll be like Cyndi Lauper.

Gaga lies to her fans on a regular basis in order to keep this hype up. Business can learn Nothing from lady gaga. Business is all about integrity, honestly and working hard to earn what you get. Lady gaga stands for the exact oposite.

Come on Tanasoff….let’s concentrate on the subject…..Building Loyalty. In business you win some lose some. Lady gaga is known for being known as the only modern singer to really perform & sing live….well Adele, beyonce too. Even you admit that.Give Gags the credit she deserve…..you’ll never have another musician like her… You sound like a Nicki garbage Minaj fan…